Houston artist revives Schulenburg dance hall

Houston artist brings Schulenburg dance hall back to life

Owner Dana Roy Harper, a visual artist from Houston, and Teri Joyce take a look around the first floor at Sengelmann Hall.

Owner Dana Roy Harper, a visual artist from Houston, and Teri Joyce take a look around the first floor at Sengelmann Hall.

Photo: James Nielsen, Chronicle

Photo: James Nielsen, Chronicle

Image
1of/1

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 1

Owner Dana Roy Harper, a visual artist from Houston, and Teri Joyce take a look around the first floor at Sengelmann Hall.

Owner Dana Roy Harper, a visual artist from Houston, and Teri Joyce take a look around the first floor at Sengelmann Hall.

Photo: James Nielsen, Chronicle

Houston artist revives Schulenburg dance hall

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

SCHULENBURG — As it happened in so many small towns, Main Street here was left behind by the interstate.

Among the 19th-century buildings along the quiet street is charming Sengelmann Hall. A former dance hall and saloon, it opened in 1894 and closed in the 1940s.

This weekend, Sengelmann Hall will be reborn. It is being brought back to life — not by a development company or wealthy town elder but by Dana Roy Harper, a 37-year-old artist from Houston.

He is investing more than $1 million, hoping his live-music venue, Czech/German restaurant, biergarten, Czech bakery and general store will make Sengelmann Hall a tourist destination. Imagine a Gruene Hall halfway between Houston and San Antonio, just a mile off Interstate 10.

For Harper, Sengelmann Hall is more than a business venture. It’s his vision of how life should be: less corporate and more authentic and mindful of the past.

He is raising bees to make honey for the restaurant and planning to grow vegetables, peaches and berries to sell at a farm stand outside the dance hall.

His restaurant will serve local and regional meat, dairy and produce, and feature everything from burgers to braised rabbit wrapped in prosciutto.

Bar food will include a Czech appetizer called topinka: sliced homemade rye bread fried in duck fat and rubbed in garlic.

The music will be mostly country, including traditional, progressive and Western swing. A polka band will play on Sunday afternoons, like Sengelmann Hall did in the old days.

The place to be

Older Schulenburg residents are thrilled by the return of Sengelmann Hall.

“It’s kind of like a dream that it’s happening,” 80-year-old Frank Tilicek said.

He remembers when Main Street in Schulenburg on a Saturday night was “a production.” That was in the 1930s and ’40s, before the arrival of TV. People strolled up and down Main, visiting bars, cafes and a movie house, and the barbershop stayed open until 10 p.m.

And Sengelmann Hall was the place downtown, Tilicek said.

“All my life we’ve been thinking, ‘What can we do to bring Sengelmann Hall back?’ ”

It took an outsider to make it happen, albeit one with strong local connections. Throughout his life, Harper has spent weekends on a family farm near Schulenburg, and his great-great-grandmother came from there.

Bought 11 years ago

Harper is the great-great-grandson of oil titan and philanthropist Hugh Roy Cullen.

According to family legend, Cullen came to Schulenburg “to find a good German wife” before settling in Houston, Harper said.

He married one of the wealthiest young women in town, Lillie Cranz, and her parents helped Cullen start his oil business, Harper said.

Cullen made so much money in oil he was nicknamed “King of the Wildcatters.”

A visual artist, Harper has been involved in some of his family’s business investments.

Harper bought Sengelmann Hall on his own 11 years ago. The first time he entered the upstairs dance hall, which had been shuttered for decades, he found rusty beer bottle caps and glass beads that had come loose from women’s dresses on the dance floor.

‘Architectural treasure’

Locals are helping him with the dance hall’s history.

There’s a bullet hole in one of the elegant pink-granite columns, from the time when a man hid behind it.

The first bullet struck the column, and the next one entered the man’s back, Harper said.

Upstairs is a hat-check booth where beer and cocktail tickets were sold, and it’s covered by chicken wire.

The owners, brothers Charles and Gustav Sengelmann, installed the mesh to discourage theft, Harper was told.

There used to be a separate stairway for women and children so that they could avoid the men’s saloon when they headed to the dance floor upstairs.

The idea to revive Sengelmann Hall came to Harper in 2007. He and his wife, Hana Hillerova Harper, were driving on a Houston freeway, passing one strip center after another.

“Miles and miles of all these new generic developments,” Harper said. “It was all the same.”

“Who did all these developments?” his wife asked.

“It’s possible that my family investments paid for some of them,” he replied.

The couple decided to get involved in a project totally unlike the strip centers — something more Old World and akin to Hillerova Harper’s native Czechoslovakia.

She helped conceive the restaurant menu and is providing Czech recipes for the bakery, which opens this summer.

“Hana and Dana Harper have rescued a real architectural treasure,” said architectural historian Stephen Fox, who also credited their architects, Stern & Bucek.

Worth the risk

Harper knows Sengelmann Hall is a big risk, but that only makes the project more “exhilarating,” he said.

Harper said he has money but is not super-rich.

To fund Sengelmann Hall, “he pulled money from his family investments,” Hillerova Harper said. “If it doesn’t work we could lose our house.”

Soon after deciding to restore Sengelmann Hall, Harper said, he had “an intense vision of it completed and full of people.

“I thought of my ancestors dancing upstairs. That image is so clear that it gives me courage. Any time I get doubts I’ll meditate on that vision.”

He said he had no idea of how much pressure there would be in doing the project.

“I don’t like the business side,” he said. “I’m just looking forward to enjoying the place.”